My Father' War

Over the past ten years, my curiosity about ‘my father’s war’ led to extensive reading and travel. I followed the route of the First Army in Tunisia, where my father a Cameron Highlander, was awarded the MBE, then on to Normandy, where he was with the Third Infantry and mentioned in despatches.. In the paintings I mix the past with the present. Artefacts which are seen as treasured objects in museums are conceptually removed and returned to the field of battle or introduced into the domestic environment as a constant reminder of the ugliness and devastation of war. In many of the works my own dominant figure is the “War Tourist” epitomising compassion, loneliness, despair, terror, pain or even death.

Major Robert Cairns

Joyce Cairns travelled to the scenes of her father’s war armed only with clues. Like many of those with personal memories of warfare, Major Robert Cairns did not speak casually of his experiences, left no memoir or diary that could inform an itinerary. But that which he did leave was nevertheless sufficient to arouse and inform a daughter’s need to affirm what her father had done, to follow some of the paths he took during the Second World War in those years of heightened experience that conveyed him and the men of his generation away from the familiar world of home, family and work. The things he did leave behind, tangible things, artefacts, appear and re-appear in Joyce’s paintings. Insignia and uniform, postcards and photographs: these items are the stock in trade for those of us who record and interpret the history of warfare through collections of objects.Extract from 'Major Robert Cairns, His War' by Stuart AllanSenior Curator of Military History, National War Museum, Edinburgh Castle.